EDITOR'S CHOICE -- SCOTT SUTTELL

Cleveland loves its sports -- and pays a lot for them

Blog Entry: February 01, 2013 1:36 PM | Author: SCOTT SUTTELL

MarketWatch.com and 24/7 Wall St. try to evaluate which U.S. cities pay the most for the privilege of watching their pro sports teams, and for a change in the sporting world, Cleveland is near the top.

To identify the 10 cities that spend the most money per capita on sports stadiums, the websites relied on “Public/Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities,” a book on municipal stadium spending by Judith Grant Long. To calculate the total per capita expense that each city bore, Ms. Long included financing costs for all sports stadiums that were in operation as of 2010.

Cleveland is No. 4 on the list, with a public per capita stadium cost of $517, based on a regional population of 2.068 million.

Here's how the websites describe the Cleveland market:

As of 2010 the public costs of all three major sports facilities in Cleveland was just under $1.1 billion, with 75% of the funds needed to build the stadiums coming from the public. The most expensive was Cleveland Browns Stadium, which cost $441 million. The other two facilities, Progressive Field and Quicken Loans Arena, were built in 1994. The cost of those facilities was $399 million and $328 million, respectively. Cleveland's professional sports teams, however, have struggled to compete. The last major professional sports team in the city to win a title was the Browns, who won the NFL Championship in 1964.

No. 1 on the list is Green Bay, Wis., with a public per capita stadium cost of $1,114. Green Bay, though, is an anomaly, since it's an ultra-small market (309,469 people) with only one pro team, the Packers.

This and that

Lending is the key:KeyCorp CEO Beth Mooney made an appearance on Jim Cramer's CNBC talk show and talked up the bank's recent strength in commercial and industrial lending.

“We see the biggest strength is in our commercial mortgage banking business which had a record year in 2012 because there's a very, very strong market for debt placement,” Ms. Mooney said during the interview. “And if you look at our investment banking and debt placement income, it was up 75% year-over-year, and some piece of that was driven by the strength in commercial mortgage banking.”

Mr. Cramer, a fan of regional banks, is very bullish on Key, noting that the stock was below $7 a share last June and now is above $9.

cold comfort: I enjoyed the comment from a Cleveland commodity futures trader in this Wall Street Journal story about financial con man Russell Wasendorf Sr., who on Thursday was sentenced to the maximum 50 years in jail after admitting to orchestrating a fraud at his futures brokerage and misleading regulators for almost 20 years.

Mr. Wasendorf, 64, pleaded guilty last September to the fraud at Peregrine Financial Group Inc. that federal prosecutors said “had cost clients $215.5 million and masked a business that never was profitable,” according to The Journal. He also was ordered to pay the full amount of missing funds in restitution.

But that's a pipe dream. Mr. Wasendorf's assets are being liquidated but they aren't expected to come close to covering the shortfall, according to the receiver and trustee in the case.

The Journal says Mr. Wasendorf's sentence brought little comfort to Kevyn Davey, a 45-year-old independent commodity futures trader in Cleveland. Mr. Davey tells the paper that he lost around $5,000 when Peregrine filed for bankruptcy.

"To me, the fact that he rots in jail doesn't matter," he says. "The money would be the thing."

Concentration: Poverty in the last decade has risen most rapidly in neighborhoods that already have a lot of poor people, according to this commentary from three researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

The increasing concentration of poverty was found in 83 of the 100 metro areas studied by researchers Dionissi Aliprantis, Kyle Fee and Nelson Oliver.

In the Cleveland Fed's service area of Ohio and western Pennsylvania, “the concentration of poverty rose markedly in many major metro areas due to the severity of the recession in Ohio,” according to the bank.

The researchers found that between 2000 and 2010, the total poverty rate of the U.S. rose from 11.3% to 15.3%. The government's official poverty threshold is a family of four earning just more than $22,000 a year.

The permanent campaign: A leading Democratic Super PAC, House Majority PAC, is getting a jump on the 2014 mid-term elections by announcing that it will target for defeat 10 House Republicans, including the newly elected David Joyce in Geauga County, who represents Ohio's 14th congressional district.

"They all represent competitive districts and they all have records and beliefs that are out of touch with the districts they represent," House Majority PAC spokesman Andy Stone tells The Huffington Post.

The effort to oust the 10 House members will be the main focus of House Majority PAC in 2013, according to the story. This will include "earned media, paid media, social media and online campaigns," Mr. Stone says.

A nice clip: Congratulations, fellow Ohioans. Relative to most of our fellow Americans, we are cautious with money.

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